


Lightning (Strikes Twice)

by Gen42Joker



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 10:57:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16366547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gen42Joker/pseuds/Gen42Joker
Summary: Growing up in the Bloody Mist is a dirty, dangerous affair but Benihime's fine. Really. (She isn't)(Alternatively: Life as a Kiri-nin is difficult and people suffer)





	Lightning (Strikes Twice)

**Author's Note:**

> So I understand what ppl mean when they talk about gateway drugs and starting new fics now. Oops.

Her first memory was of a dark, empty room. She rolled over onto her stomach and peered around blearily. The room was completely bare aside from her little corner of blankets and the only source of light in the room came from a small gap between the ground and the door.

She stayed in her nest of blankets for a long time, occasionally falling back asleep before waking again. When she woke up after her latest nap, she discovered that she was hungry and had soiled herself sometime during her nap.

She cried for a long time. She cried until her throat hurt and her tears dried up. She cried and cried until she cried herself to sleep.

 

\---

 

When she next woke, she was still hungry and still uncomfortable. The little bumps on her forehead hurt from pressing against the wall and her eyes were swollen. She was still alone in her dark, empty room. This time, she didn’t bother crying.

Instead, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. She looked around the room but found it just as empty and bare as before. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the light coming from the under the door (not that she really knew what a door was). For the first time since she’d found herself in the room, the girl left her corner of the room.

She tried crawling at first, but the dirty floor irritated her hands and knees so she stopped. Then, she tried pushing herself to her feet. She immediately fell on her butt. She pondered this. She tried again, slowly this time, with a hand on the wall to support her. She successfully took her first wobbly steps but fell once again when she lost her balance.

She wondered if she (they/it/who?) should just go back to crawling. But the girl was stubborn and she was almost at the light anyways, so she pulled herself up once more and slowly made her way to the light.

Once at she reached her goal, she let herself drop to the ground in order to investigate the light. She reached out for the light and stared when her hand grabbed empty air. She tried again with her other hand but received the same result. She wanted to cry.

 

\---

 

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there in silence when she saw movement in the light. By now, she’d realized that she cast a shadow every time she put her hand in that light and made the connection that the new shadows must be coming from the other side. She laid down on her stomach and peered into the light. From her new position, she saw a pair of feet approach.

She sat up, shocked, when _the door_ _opened_ and she was met with the sight of a dark haired man.

She was so startled that she didn’t register the noises he was making until he grabbed her and pulled her up into his arms. He wrinkled his nose at her and made more garbled noises at her. She stared back blankly, busy taking in the details of his face.

The first thing she noticed was that he didn’t have any horns. He was pale like her but where she had two little nubs peeking out of her white hair, his short jet black hair lay flat on his forehead. His eyes were a plain brown but in that moment, they were the most fascinating things she had ever seen. He had three jagged scars running down the left side of his face, one of which bisected his eye, and they made the stern set of his eyes and mouth rather intimidating. His voice was deep and gruff, nothing at all like the high-pitched noises she’d made when she’d cried.

However, his solid grip on her was gentle. The man carried her down a long hallway with several rooms that looked similar to hers and turned left at the intersection. From there, he made his way confidently through a dizzying number of hallways until he reached his destination.

He set her down in a white tiled room and made quick work of stripping her down before tossing her in one of the empty shower stalls. He tied a towel around his own waist and then turned on the water.

The girl immediately panicked and tried to escape the spray of warm water. The large man caught her easily enough and pushed her back under the shower. He growled something at her and jabbed a finger at the ground. She stared back, bewildered, but stayed put.

The man looked satisfied when she made no move to escape and grabbed a bar of soap. She let the man pull her out of the water for a bit to scrub her down, uncomfortable but resigned to her fate, and when he pushed her back under the shower, she went obediently.

Once she eventually got used to the feeling of the water on her skin, the girl found herself enjoying the sensation and let the man push her back under after he scrubbed shampoo into her hair. After the shower, he quickly toweled her dry and produced a plain grey shirt and dark pants for her to wear.

Once she was dressed, the man scooped her up again and carried her down another dizzying set of plain grey hallways. The further they went, the more people they passed. None of them had any horns. The man nodded at a few of the people wearing masks but said nothing as he made his way through the building.

He finally stopped at a set of plain white doors. He glanced down at the girl in his arms and said something else at her. She didn’t bother responding but he looked unperturbed by her silence and shifted his grip on her so that he could open the door with one hand.

 

\---

 

Until she’d met the man, the girl’s entire world had consisted of the four corners of her dark room. In her limited experience, outside was long endless hallways, the spray of water on her skin, and the quiet presence of masked figures.

Now, she found herself leaving all of that behind, still safely tucked into the arms of her savior, and in a new world with cloudy grey skies and streets filled with the endless thrum of people coming and going. She watched the people around her as the man easily carried her through the crowd, steps quiet and confident.

A lot of the people were dirty and noisy and _annoying_ but there were some men and women who were much less objectionable and walked with the same deadly confidence of her savior. They all wore the same headband with the squiggly symbols.

The man holding her noticed her staring at the symbols carved into his headband and smiled at her for the first time. He tapped at his headband with a knuckle and spoke solemnly.

“Kirigakure.”

 

\---

 

Her savior eventually introduced himself with a gruff, “Hibiki,” once she learned how to speak.

He wasn’t very talkative, which suited her just fine, and as long as she payed attention during her lessons, he didn’t seem particularly fussed about what she did with her time. He was a strict taskmaster but she was determined to prove herself worth the investment and passed everything he threw at her with flying colors. 

A few years passed in this vein.

On her fourth birthday, her master abruptly declared her fit to take care of herself and left on a mission. He left her a list of katas she was to practice daily, some money, and a pouch of senbon. She had almost smiled at that last one when he’d brusquely dumped the pouch in her lap and muttered a quiet, “Happy birthday, brat,” before taking off.

It had been three days since then, and she was now making her way to the market. She didn’t really enjoy leaving her master’s house but she was running low on rice and needed to pick up some more tea.

People always stared at her when she went outside. White hair was fairly common in Kiri, but her red eyes and the pair of thin, white horns peeking out from her forehead set her apart. Civilians tended to steer clear of shinobi so it wasn’t an issue usually, but her master was on a mission now and she wasn’t a shinobi yet. To her dismay, she found herself quickly approached by several children.

“What’s your name?” one of the annoyances asked her.

“Why do you have horns?” another piped.

“Can I touch them?” a particularly grimy girl asked hopefully.

She glared mulishly. “No,” she bit out and continued on her way. Unfortunately, the pack of street urchins wasn’t so easily deterred and they noisily trailed after her, asking about her hair and her eyes and her horns.

“C’mon don’t be so stingy,” an older boy whined as he stumbled after her. He reached for one of her horns.

Unfortunately for the other child, she was rather well trained for a four-year-old and the moment his hand reached for her, she lashed out with one of her new senbon. She quickly yanked it out of his hand when he pulled the appendage back with a startled cry of pain and placed it back in the holster on her wrist.

“Don’t touch me,” she sniffed at the shocked pack of children and turned to continue on to the market.

 

\---

 

On her way back from the market, she became aware of the sensation of someone following her. She glanced around but while plenty of people were staring, she had the feeling that her stalker was more discreet than that. She carefully shifted her purchases into her right hand and palmed a senbon with her left as she slipped into a narrow alleyway.

Her stalker followed her as she made her way through the maze of alleys and she caught a few glimpses of black hair as they struggled to keep up. Not a shinobi, then. No self-respecting shinobi would be so careless.

She hopped over a stack of crates as she considered her options. She’d been wandering for close to an hour now and her stalker was still following her. If she went home, her pursuer would likely follow her all the way to her master’s home so that was out. She could try to lose them, but she was weighed down with her purchases and she wasn’t going to waste her time and money by dropping them now. That left confronting her stalker.

She abruptly stopped in the middle of the dirty alley she was currently in and waited. She stood patiently for a good fifteen minutes until her stalker finally stepped out from behind a large garbage bin.

He was a pale, skinny boy with black hair and sharp black eyes. He looked to be a bit older than her and glared when she stared back impatiently.

“Well?” she snapped. She was _irritated_. She regretted her snappish comment for half a second – her wonderful master was always calm and she constantly worked to emulate him in any way possible – but kept her expression impassive. Her master had always told her that she had a good poker face – likely from her time in isolation as a baby – and he’d shown her that it was a good way to make people uncomfortable.

“I saw you earlier. You’re strong,” the boy replied. “You’d make a good tool.”

She blinked. What was that supposed to mean? Had that been a compliment? An insult?

He ignored her confusion and continued with complete confidence, “I’m going to be a shinobi.” He smiled and she absently noticed his teeth had been filed to points. “And I’m going to need a good weapon.” Ah, a compliment, then?

She studied the boy for a long moment. Her master had once said that shinobi were weapons for the sake of the village but she’d always struggled with abstract concepts and she didn’t much like the idea of having to follow orders from a village she didn’t even particularly _like_.

“What’s your name?”

“Momochi Zabuza,” the boy declared with a fierce grin.

She found the corners of her lips lifting in response.

“My name is Benihime. I look forward to working with you.”


End file.
